How To: Replacing H-Base Screws on an Eames Shell Chair

A fine companion piece to my post on How To: Replace Plastic Chair Foot on Eames for Herman Miller Shell Chairs.

In the great move of 2015 few things were lost or broken. But one of those things gone MIA includes the screws used to attach my Eames shell chairs to their H-bases. After some website consultation and a half hour of trying out screws inside the local hardware store, it's been determined that the best replacements are 1/4-28 X 1/2 machine screws (i.e., 1/4" diameter, 28 thread, 1/2" long). These chairs happen to be 'fine threaded', but a 'coarse threaded' chair would likely use 1/4-20 X 1/2 screws. Similar, just wider-spaced threading.

If you don't have any original screws to base your estimate from, you can do as I did and take your chair to the hardware store. Try out screws, but don't force them (you don't want to destroy the threading in the hole). Pick the screw that twists in the easiest, without being too small.

Of course. Immediately after we figured all this out, the original screws reappeared in a sandwich bag in J's toolbox.


Still on the to do list: find wherever the heck the Roku remote went.